My opinion on this isn’t that strong.
I think it was 3.0 when I started the game. The first dungeon I did was Wailing Caverns, it was on a troll hunter named Swamper btw.
After that I did one of the Razorfen dungeons. Then Uldaman. After that my next dungeons were in Outland. I’m not sure if I did any of the Wotlk dungeons during levelling.
Bearing in mind that I was completely new to the game, whenever 3.3 hit and the random dungeon system was added I did a lot more low level dungeons and tried out healing and tanking.
I feel bad for the people who were doing heroics with me though, since I really had no idea what I was doing until the very end when it didn’t even matter anymore.
Edit: Like there was things that made the experience bad back then which probably doesn’t apply anymore; like I would never be able to find the dungeon entrance if I died.
We all have seen what lfd did to retail…we really want to see classic wrath go that direction? Just be patient and wait and see…we may all be surprised with the result. LFD did not come out with original wrath right away hehe. No need to get upset just yet <3
It kept it alive for 15 years ? Really dont want that, especially with how messed up the situation already is on classic servers …
i think it was the cashshop, gold token, gold farmers, and boost communities that kept the game ‘alive’ for players who have severe impulse control and fomo issues. That drove the huge shift in player mentality and attitude as well as drive off actual players who played the content. That’s why blizz will never actually resolve the player created systems nor rid the game of tokens or cashshop. Way more money is made off of younger people who just want to blow through the game to do endgame content and then quit once they get their loot. *shrugs
Soooo when you said
it actually did nothing to the retail, because the problem is community changing, and gold farmers and boosts and other trash already existed during vanilla …
I understand what people are trying to say, but the thing you are trying to achieve, will never exist again and it sure as hell wont come back by letting blizz change random stuff for no reason …
ofc it existed back then, silly. they did not clog EVERY global chat channel with spam, just city trade chats–LFG was usable too. It was no where NEAR the level it is now. Boosts/carries are normalized now…back then, you were blacklisted if it was found out you bought a carry lol as for retail, look at the state it is now. i am not saying lfd is the cause of it all but it certainly contributed to the breakdown of social interaction and the need to be in a guild.
another issue with lfd: the complaints of ‘fake’ tanks/healers/dps. folks will resort to queueing as those, if their class allows it. That was the biggest complaint of lfd. ret pally queueing as healer, warrior dps as tanks, pvp players not pulling damage due to full pvp sets, etc.
And then you get back to the actual thing being #1 lfd was already in wotlk, although Id like to see it added earlier, since they completely nuked timing of phases in TBC, I will have 0 issues if they add it near the ICC release, but blizz went out of their way to say they are removing it completely and #2 removing LFD from 15 years old content wont magically change the community and seeing how bad classics are right now, it could actually make it a bit more enjoyable instead …
So you have 1 total miss and one partial hit, meaning its typical blizz approach to fixing problems that dont exist by making one stop forward and five back …
i see it as: blizz understands the issues that lfd brought to the franchise. the finder never came immediately anyways and perhaps this go around they want to see how the world develops with out it. the age of the content does not matter, it’s the quality of game experience that does. the community is just a new gen of players who have been entrained (social media and mobile games for example) to have the fomo attitude and take the easiest route possible for it’s more ‘efficient’ even if it goes against the game’s intended function. wow was built around the idea of social interaction to achieve goals, goals which were not meant to be rushed through.
And then they removed arena teams, which isnt even something that happened on wotlk, so you can just now inv someone, que for arena and instantly leave the group after single game because they didnt play in the way you want them to play … which is how it works on retail 99,9% of the time …
Not even mentioning how many people out there would actually like to enjoy social interaction but cant since joining HC dungeon requires you to have full end game gear and only way to start gearing is boost runs … we had tons of people on wotlk in our guild who were happy they can finally start playing the game without cocky elitists kicking them out of every group …
That problem exists, but removing LFD wont fix it …
Also what I meant by 15yo content is that the community is 15yo, thats what matters, if this was discussion before wotlks first launch, I would probably be against random groups, especially if we knew about modern retail group finder (not that garbage that is on tbcc right now) … but this is different time with different community and you cant approach it as if these things didnt matter …
(also xD Consider replying to more people
You’ve already replied 3 times to @Gabapentiin-firemaw in this particular topic.
Have you considered replying to other people in the discussion, too? A great discussion involves many voices and perspectives. didnt know this was even a thing
)
hmm…i do heroics just fine with my guildies. not even full dps set up yet (swapped to ele to help the guild raid teams hehe) that is simply false that you need full end game gear or resort to buying boosts to do heroics. find a guild with like minded people and enjoy the game. that is the spirit of wow–working via social interaction to get stuff done, including getting yourself geared up. i am always looking for fun players who have a great team work mentality, actively play the game and want to experience raiding! hit me up if you are ever wishing to join <3
Which is thing you can still do even with LFD around, when it came out we would always made a group in guild, noone wants to run with slowpoke randoms when you can clear it with friends in few minutes, so you can still have social interaction and LFD …
But you dont have squad online every time and LFD beats mindless spamming in LFG chat any time …
no need to spam lfg chat or use mods to find groups, if you simply find a good active guild to grow with hehe lfd will just force people to be even more distant with each other. it will not fix the issue of looking for groups, it will entrain people to do minimum effort for higher rewards.
I started playing actively on retail during Legion (and stopped again during BFA xD) but due to unforeseen consequences I had to move and change job, and that really axed my attempts to play the game, so I had to manually make raids and groups for any content I wanted to play in weird unusual times …
You can still have social interaction even with LFD and LFR around
And your edit, higher rewards, we are talking about HC dungeons here, they are filler garbage, my main problem is blizz doing their “you think you do” nonsense here, otherwise I wouldnt even bother arguing about heroics …
None of these are simply “valid” arguments againt LFD … make some changes to it, make deserter more punishing, make it realm only, add hard ID lockouts like standard HC, add it with ICC like it originally was, sure, all these things could be done it … but removing LFD just because someone had bad mood that day and didnt talk as much as usual in his one daily HC, is simply nonsense …
PS: also I had guild during legion, they were awesome guys we had tons of fun, and I met them in LFD run and joined their guild almost immediately at the end … I just didnt have that much time to join them on every run, so I had to look elsewhere …
I played vanilla-cata and left after heroic firelands-- due to the direction of the game. after 7 years, came back to wow and made this toon hehe Retail plays like a mobile game now lol Was a kick in the gut to see that what i had worked so hard for was turned into garbage. =( ngl, super happy i missed all those xpacs (level 120 grind must have been awful) but am super sad at how the community is now.
I was making fun of WoW how it will turn to mobile game or console game, since half of classes now play like some moba with 4 buttons, especially demon hunters, and some time later they actually added controller support and wowhead even made post about it that almost looked like april news xD
hahaha i mean, for all we know their big mobile announcement will be ‘play retail on your phone now!’ lol we have all seen blizz and their april fools joke nonsense, remember when mop was the april fools joke and then they announced it as an xpack? hahaha
Did you ever stop to think that the community might have changed because the game changed? Or is that concept just completely foreign to you? Retail has nowhere near the subscribers that old-school WoW had. Most of the people remaining now are the few that decided they are able to tolerate the garbage Blizzard turned the game into.
There have been many changes over the years, which have been contentious so many people left for many different reasons. Rework of the old world, LFR, Warforged, Titanforged, personalised loot, class reworks, the talents, poor storytelling, questionable balance, real life controversies to name but a few.
100%, definitely not claiming LFD alone dragged the game down into the sewers.